Tom Hanks Hosts Academy Museum Event as Project Nears Completion

Tom Hanks speaks at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’s unveiling of the Saban Building event at the Petersen Automotive Museum.

By Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

Next year will mark the long-awaited debut of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures—a six-floor cultural institution next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that is expected to attract one million visitors annually.

On Tuesday night the lights were turned on.

In an event held at the Petersen Automotive Museum, across the street from the main building of the new museum, the former iconic May Co. department store—now named the Saban Building (in honor of Haim and Cheryl Saban’s $50 million gift)—was lit up, highlighting its gold mosaic tower that was painstakingly restored with original Italian tiles.

Tom Hanks, the Academy’s campaign co-chair along with Universal vice chairman Ron Meyer (an Academy Museum board trustee); Diane Keaton; Diane Lane; Jason Blum; Netflix’s Ted Sarandos with the stars of Roma,Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira; and other high-profile donors were on hand to celebrate the progress of the seven-year project that has been beset by difficulties since it was first announced.

“We are all part of a community that loves our city, loves Los Angeles, loves the promise that exists by preserving and honoring our architectural heritage,” Hanks said in the last of the prepared remarks of the night. “The museum behind us will be filled with magnificent exhibits, wonders that will rotate—it will be filled with artifacts, it will be filled with ideas, hopes, and dreams.”

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he continued. “People from all around the globe are going to come to Los Angeles to go to the Museum of Motion Pictures. [It] is going to be a stop that everybody will make when they visit the city of Los Angeles. I’m not taking anything away from Mickey Mouse or Harry Potter. This will be, if not the first or the second, it will be the third must-stop. They will come, and if not, we will put their feet into the La Brea Tar Pits and make them stay.”

When the project was first announced, plans from architect Renzo Piano indicated the museum would open in 2016 and cost $250 million. Since then, costs have ballooned to $388 million and the Academy is nearing its goal with funds raised north of $300 million from such donors as Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Netflix, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Charles V. Roven and Thomas Spiegel family foundations.

Hanks added that donors such as Barbra Streisand,Steve Tisch’s family foundation, and Ron Meyer have now also contributed, along with financial institutions such as the East West Bank and JPMorgan Chase.

“We still have a little way to go,” said Hanks about the fund-raising efforts. “I want you to go back into your own lives and remember that time when you thought, ‘Hey, we should redo our bathrooms.’ And you had this dollar figure in your mind and you had a certain amount of days, two weeks. Well, guess what, it took a little more time and a little more money, didn’t it? So we are close, but we are going to get there with the help of us all and a few more phone calls and bringing in a few more people.”

There is now also a better idea of what’s going to be inside the museum, which includes a spherical glass structure—nicknamed the Death Star—that will hold a state-of-the-art theater. In addition, there will be a slew of populist memorabilia, including one of the surviving pairs of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz; the doors of Rick’s Café from Casablanca; and a photo stop called “the Oscars experience.” There will also be a gallery that allows attendees to step into the stargate-corridor sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A rendering of the Academy Museum of Moving Images in Los Angeles.

The centerpiece of the museum will be a 30,000-square-foot exhibition space that will trace the history of cinema from the filmmakers’ point of view, while galleries will focus on a multitude of subjects: female directors, international silent film, Soviet cinema, and the Hollywood studio system, among others.

The museum’s first temporary exhibit will be centered on Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki, who won an Oscar back in 2003 for Spirited Away, and an honorary statuette in 2014 for his body of work. Plans for 2020 include an inclusion exhibit titled Regeneration: Black Cinema 1900-1970 as the replacement for the Miyazaki show.